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Intellectual Property Manifesto for the UK
feepcreature writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the British Library has published a Manifesto calling for a balance in Intellectual Property rights between the interests of users, creators and publishers. There are 6 key recommendations, including: DRM should not override users' statutory rights; analogue rights should apply to digital media; and copyright terms should not be extended without evidence that this would be good for society. There is also part of the debate on the UK Government's Gowers review of Intellectual Property, due to report in the Autumn."
All that is well and good. We (the communal 'we', not the 'we' as in you Limeys) should of course be allowed to retain the same rights to content and media as was available before they became digital. Digital, as they say in their very first point, is not really different fundamentally than any other publishing medium, and therefore the rights extended to non-digital content should also be extended to digital content.
The real point I was struck by was how they still hold on to the belief that copyright must last "life+70 years". That can easily last over 100 years of copyright, bestowing on heirs of the creator the benefits of his hard work. This does not incent those heirs to do any creating and only pools the money in their pockets while simultaneously making poor the common intellectual property pool.
a (age) + p (plus 70) = t (too freaking long)
What we need is an ool. Notice there's no 'p' in it.
well, i certainly like the looks of this, except for the support for the "life +70" copyright term, which is completely excessive IMO.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
2. Immense possible harm to producers. If people are just copying your content free of charge, it's going to eat into your profits in most likely scenarios. In some scenarios, you might cease production entirely, or shift towards more difficult-to-copy formats.
Don't forget the immense possible benefit to producers: zero cost of production.
Oh, it's not about what companies are pushing DRM. No, see this is a library taking the fight to the copyright industry preemptively. They've seen how the movie and music industry is going after P2P services, and they know that they're next.
All this "sharing" stuff - don't you know that denying companies their deserved profit is stealing?! Think of those poor starving authors whose work you borrowed from the library instead of buying it! Thieving old gradmas, reading books for free! There should be a law I tells ya!
(Note for the humour impaired: The preceding was not serious, and should not be read if you are sarcasm deficient. Warning: Sarcasm should not be taken internally).
That should read: "Don't forget the immense possible benefit to producers: zero cost of reproduction."
The cost to produce the first copy will still exist.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Create more distance between politicians and money. After that, we will see more balance between public and private interests.
Not really, no. But drastically lowered cost of production, zero cost of distribution and near-zero cost of marketing. These can be recouped in other ways than selling physical copies of content -- in ways that are more diverse, more resilient to technology shifts and gives more money to the real creators. No wonder the distributors are scared shitless...
Money for nothing, pix for free
But drastically lowered cost of production
As another poster already pointed out, the initial cost of production still exists. Depending on what it is being produced, the move to a digital distribution method may have little or no impact on the cost of production (eg for a writer going from typewriter to PC isn't going to make a whole lot of difference to the amount of money they spend producing the work).
zero cost of distribution
Bandwidth is free now? Servers are free?
Cost of distribution is much lower per unit, but it most certainly is not zero.
and near-zero cost of marketing.
Why is that? Because the moment you put something on the web, google and word of mouth will do all your marketing for you? Why does going digital all-but eliminate the need to market your product?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Hmm. Would we suddenly see all sorts of mysterious deaths of authors directly after they publish their works, if the copyright on their works would immediately end? I do agree in principle, but I think a fixed duration of copyright, regardless of how long the copyright holder lives, might be better.
"zero cost of production"
Let's take the iTMS move store, for example. I submit that the bandwidth needed to download a 1.2GB file has SOME cost, as does building and maintaining the infrastructure needed to ensure that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people can do so simultaneously.
And anytime you want to talk about delivering a million copies of anything I think you'll find the costs are far from inconsequential.
As far as that goes, I'd almost be willing to bet that once those costs are taken into account, the actual costs of delivering a movie online is perhaps only a single order of magnitude away from that of delivering a piece of plastic to a store.
The actual cost of a mass-produced disc is pennies on the dollar anyway. You pay for the content.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
The British Library does take a fairly balanced view on this subject ("life+70" excepted), but there is one important area where their view is not balanced at all: they believe that libraries are somehow exceptional in their needs. Well they're not.
Libraries have many roles, but almost none of those roles are exclusive. The three most important ones are collecting, sharing, and archiving for posterity, but these roles are also performed within society as a whole (as a normal part of life and culture), and therefore libraries do not have exclusive need for protections here. We all do.
P2P is probably the most contentious sharing technology today, yet what P2P'ers do is not significantly different to what libraries do --- ie. provide access to their collections to the public. They're similar not only in function, but also in social neutrality and economic effect: sharing is available to everyone equally, no money is made or taken from the sharing, they both reduce somewhat the sales of the items in question, and they both provide free public promotion for the items as well.
The role of archiving for posterity is not exclusive to libraries either --- nobody wants to lose their collected works through media deterioration from old age, so being able to make copies and not being at the mercy of DRM is important for everyone, not just libraries. Indeed, passing down our digital collections to our descendents will undoubtedly be a common interest.
So, while I support what the British Library is saying for the most part, their preoccupation with the needs of libraries sends the wrong message --- we are all in that same boat.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
But it was a good question: the companies are the same companies as elsewhere, both US and multi-national. Sony, Disney, Samsung, and other companies interested in DRM protecting their digital investment help prevent what folks in the US call "fair rights" use.
These desires for DRM are supported heavily by Microsoft, which wants to protect its software licenses and prevent other software from writing or even reading the private formats they use, especially for "personally encrypted" files. The whole field of DRM is about to get much worse with the "Trusted Computing" software program, led by Microsoft, which locks software and media to a specific motherboard's encryption and authentication chip, and which will als be built into the next generation of AMD and Intel CPU's. These tools are aimed squarely at preventing duplication of digital media, and create a real burden for making backup or archival copies of these media. They also specifically restrict the authorized software tools to play these media, making "fair use" sampling or even using other non-specifically licensed players very difficult.
The libraries of the world are quite right to be concerned about this.
IP law should respect the fact that there are many different fields of endevour, and different terms are appropriate for each of them. It's perfectly reasonable that the copyright on a novel should last a pretty long time (I think the author should receive some compensation if it gets made into a film 10 years later for example), but patents on computer related things should last a very short time - the computer industry is changing much faster than the book writing industry, and if the entire industry is held up for 10 years because of one guys patent, that is a very serious detriment to the public good.
Regardless of what is decided, it seems very obvious to me that the current lengths of these things are far outside what is reasonable. I'd be much more in favour of 20 years for literary/artistic works, and 3 years for patents, with the posibility of a single extension for 5 more years for patents, requiring a large fee (so only patents that are being used get extended).
That's what I think for IT patents, but longer terms might be more appropriate for slower moving industries.
money attracts power and power attracts money, inexorably
money and power will steamroll all laws, morals, decency, justice, fairness, and accountability in order to be with each other, no matter what system of government you devise or imagine
money and power will find the path of least resistance to get to one another and shortcircuit all of your good intentions
look at modern china, where 50 years of hardcore communist rhetoric has created... drum roll... the most social darwinistic model of capitalism on this planet right now. with all of the social inequalities that go along with that, abject squalor sandwiched against diamond encrusted bathrooms, modern china would make the robber barons of the gilded ages of victorian times in the usa blush
money+power: i think it's one of the fundamental forces in physics... along with entropy and taxes and magnetism
you can't beat it even in glorious goody two shoes canada: look at their recent corruption scandal that recently swept the liberals out of power up there
i'm not saying it's a good thing, i'm just saying it's pretty formidable force of nature you are contending with rather lightly
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm guessing you are quite young then? I'm over 40 and have 2 children. I write but haven't made a penny at it. Much as I enjoy writing, there is definitely an incentive to "publish" in knowing that if my work becomes popular late in my life (or just after) then my kids will benefit.
Parents want to provide for their children.
rt
That's simply not going to happen, I'll tell you why after a little background for the benefit of Johnny Foreigner.
In the UK we have this organization called "FACT", the "Federation Against Copyright Theft". These idiots put "piracy funds terrorism" type trailers are at the head of every video/DVD release and cinema screening. My favourite trailer makes the points that "you wouldn't steal a car", "you wouldn't steal a film" and then flashes "copying is stealing" accross the screen in huge letters. The purpose of these offensive little skits is to decieve the public into believing that all copyright infringement is a criminal offense comparable with theft.
How do you propose to conduct an intelligent, reasonable debate with people who will not even come to the table without lying and misrepresenting their cause?
Ohh, well, true. If you feel you get to little for what you pay the answer is of course to not buy at all. Of course, in some cases there are legal alternatives were you can pay less or even nothing at all. One such example is to buy second hand.
Except buying a lot of digital goods second hand is going to become next to impossible as they get tied to USERS rather than being tied to a physical product like a CD or DVD.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
The term of the copyright doesn't upset this analysis. What does upset it is that with the advent and rapid development of the Internet, distribution is no longer a limiting factor. There is no longer a danger that one's work won't be distributed.[1] Society has solved this issue on its own, independent of copyright laws. We don't need to protect distributors with copyrights any more.
Furthermore, the economic incentive that copyrights provide to distributors simply isn't justified. While the demand for copyrighted works has increased due to population growth and increased expressiveness, the 'supply' given to the people by increasing Internet bandwidth and ubiquity has exponentially outpaced it. Without artificial regulation (i.e., copyright law), these developments would ordinarily drive profit margins to nothing. Thus the distribution monopoly power becomes Yet Another Pointless Government Subsidy, benefiting a special interest group that isn't even contributing anything particularly worthwhile. Farm subsidies are one thing, they keep the price of bread low. Subsidizing an inefficient alternative to the Internet is pure waste.
I say end copyright protection for distributors, with the trade-off of guaranteed Internet access for everyone as a new human right. Subsidize libraries and public kiosks for net access to ensure this right. Of course, this shifts the subsidy to ISPs and the 'backbones', but their worth to society is justifiable independent of copyright law.
[1] One's work may not be watched or heard, but it will always be available for the watching. That's a demand problem, not a supply problem, and it's solved by artists competing for attention in the marketplace. This, in turn, naturally drives up the quality of the art in the eyes of the public, which is a good thing.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Funnily enough, fewer people seem to think that a reasonable proposal than snatching artists' property at, or even before, their deaths.
Who said anything about snatching property? Nothing is being removed. The state granted a monopoly of production to the original author, and this would simply mean that they don't grant that monopoly to someone else when that person dies).
If I die, my family get to keep my possessions. But they don't get to continually be paid my salary, or have any rights to my job in anyway. Why should children of artists be treated any differently? I mean, non-artists could make the same emotional argument by whining about how their family will starve if the income is no longer there, but that's tough luck. Family of non-artists have to rely on welfare or insurance for that situation, and those of artists should do to.
Perhaps making copyright a fixed-term for everyone might be a way round these issues.
The problem is, they want to sell it as a good AND a service. They want you to buy the media and its contents, and lock that down to a particular user/console. They consider this a license to use the media. But if you lose the media, or it's destroyed, they're extremely reluctant to offer up a replacement media for the 'license' you've already purchased. They want you to pay full price, again. What we want is a clear distinction. If I'm buying a license for the CONTENT, I should be able to use it in whatever format I choose. If I'm buying the physical MEDIA (product), I should be able to use it in whatever player I choose, or sell it secondhand if I want (right of first sale).
Well, the thing is, the whole point of that attestation process is to prove to a third party that you're running the software they want you to be running. It doesn't help you at all, except for the fact that they might choose not to speak to you if they suspect you're running something else. But that's none of their business, is it?
What would really make TPM work for users, instead of against them, would be a "fake out" switch. That is, the ability for the owner of the PC to make his TPM chip attest to a software configuration that he isn't actually running. That way, you'd still get the advantages of TPM (hardware encryption with keys that can't be stolen), without the disadvantages (hardware-enforced DRM).
It'd essentially do for TPM what a user agent switcher does for web browsers. Today, if you go to a site and it says "Sorry, you can't get in unless you're running IE", you can turn on your UA switcher, and now the site thinks you're running IE. But tomorrow, maybe that site won't be satisfied with your User-Agent header; maybe it'll want a digital signature from your TPM chip proving that you're running IE 7.0 on Windows Vista. If you had a fake out switch, you could still access the site, even if you're running Firefox on Linux. That might upset the people who want to lock their sites to a specific software configuration, but they can go fuck themselves - this feature would be good for users, and that's what matters.
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